Economy

Like so many, I have felt utterly overwhelmed by the viciousness and rapidity with which what Macy refers to as "The Great Unraveling" is now occurring. Like a mountain climber beginning to slip down an icy slope, I needed to find a way to check my fall, hold fast and resume the climb, even if it meant climbing up into a storm.

Simultaneous to "The Great Unraveling," Macy coined the phrase "The Great Turning" to describe "the essential adventure of our time": the shift from what she calls the "industrial growth society" that is consuming the planet to a life-sustaining civilization.

One senior White House official said that Trump did not fire Flynn; rather, Flynn made the decision to resign on his own late Monday evening because of what this official said was “the cumulative effect” of damaging news coverage about his conversations with the Russian envoy.

This official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the situation, said Trump does not relish firing people — despite his television persona on “The Apprentice” — and had intended to wait several more days before deciding whether to seek Flynn’s resignation.

Today Trump fills the Yeltsin role in American politics. As Wall St. laughs, Trump begins the process of giving away (read: privatizing) America’s assets to be owned by our new ruling kleptocracy. Inflation is coming…But not because wages go up, but because price gouging and monopoly pricing starts to dominate our everyday lives with no cheap substitutes coming from overseas due to an increasing global level of distrust and illiquidity among trading partners. Leveraged buyouts fueled by bailouts and free money from the central bankers will continue to kill competition in America. Media, energy, pharmaceutical, finance and agriculture will all be controlled by impregnable monopolies (and Warren Buffett).

When Filipino cruise workers arrive in U.S. ports with U.S. crew member visas, American laws almost never govern their conditions on board. Nearly all cruise ships are registered outside the United States, often in Panama or the Bahamas. This practice is known as flying a “flag of convenience,” and it began in the 1920s when American ship owners reflagged their ships in Panama to skirt Prohibition. When others learned they could operate under foreign regulations, the trend caught on, and now the most common countries for cruise ships’ flags are also known for their loose labor codes. The cruise industry has argued, for example, that Panamanian law doesn’t require overtime wages and that Bahamian minimum wage doesn’t apply to seafarers.

Appointed in 2009, and guided by the Dodd-Frank financial reform, Tarullo led efforts to strengthen the financial system. The Fed adopted capital requirements significantly more demanding than those laid down by international regulators, and tied them to liquidity rules aimed at ensuring banks would always have enough cash to meet their near-term obligations. It introduced regular stress tests designed to assess banks’ ability to weather a crisis, and demanded that they produce “living wills” describing how they could go bust without causing wider harm.

And while on the surface, this is great news for the future as it suggests companies may finally redirect their spending away from buybacks and dividends and into corporate growth, hiring and capex, it also means that the threshold for disappointment is the lowest it has ever been, and the pressure on both Trump and the Fed to deliver an environment that satisfied America's CEO has never been higher.

Gold & Silver

Article suggestions for the Daily Digest can be sent to [email protected]. All suggestions are filtered by the Daily Digest team and preference is given to those that are in alignment with the message of the Crash Course and the "3 Es."

You might think: trust isn’t that important. It’s just soft stuff! You can’t touch it or taste it or smell it, like, say, fresh money, a gleaming new car, apps. But trust precedes all those. Without it, the money doesn’t get spent, the goods don’t get made, the investments don’t happen. Do you spend much of yourself on what and who you don’t trust? Your money, at stores? Your time, with coworkers, Your love, with people? Perhaps you see the point. Trust is a kind of capital that precedes money and effort and ideas, financial and human and intellectual capital.